Are you still looking for the right books to gift your loved ones this holiday season? Look no further! We picked out some of our favorite books and have provided links to purchase them from your local bookstore. Through the links, you can either purchase physical copies or you can buy the audiobooks.
Books for the Kiddos & Niblings
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy.
There are mature themes in Parable of the Sower, so this is ideal for high school-age children.
Pauli Murray: The Life of a Pioneering Feminist and Civil Rights Activist by Rosita Stevens-Holsey and Terry Catasús Jennings
Rosita Stevens-Holsey is one of Pauli Murray’s nieces and a Pauli Murray Center board member. Her new book, co-authored with Terry Catasús Jennings, gives an overview of Pauli’s life, successes, and struggles.
This book is middle-grade and ideal for children between the ages of eight and twelve.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship's leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot - if she's willing to sow the seeds of civil war.
An Unkindness of Ghosts contains mature themes and is ideal for high school-age children.
Books for the History-Lovers
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
This book will be discussed in the Pauli Murray Center’s online book club in March and April 2022!
On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed
In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. Especially now that the U.S. recognizes Juneteenth (June 19) as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing.
On Juneteenth will be discussed in our June 2022 online book club!
The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice by Patricia Bell-Scott
Drawing on letters, journals, diaries, published and unpublished manuscripts, and interviews, Patricia Bell-Scott gives a close-up portrait of the friendship between Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt and how it was sustained over time, what each gave to the other, and how their friendship changed the cause of American social justice.
Books for Lovers of Poetry
Dark Testament & Other Poems by Pauli Murray
Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to Pauli Murray’s fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.
We will discuss Dark Testament in our July 2022 book club!
Dub: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs's Dub: Finding Ceremony takes inspiration from theorist Sylvia Wynter, dub poetry, and ocean life to offer a catalog of possible methods for remembering, healing, listening, and living otherwise. In these prose poems, Gumbs channels the voices of her ancestors, including whales, coral, and oceanic bacteria, to tell stories of diaspora, indigeneity, migration, blackness, genius, mothering, grief, and harm. Tracing the origins of colonialism, genocide, and slavery as they converge in Black feminist practice, Gumbs explores the potential for the poetic and narrative undoing of the knowledge that underpins the concept of Western humanity. Throughout, she reminds us that dominant modes of being human and the oppression those modes create can be challenged, and that it is possible to make ourselves and our planet anew.
Miraculous! by Natalie Patterson
Natalie Patterson has the unique ability to bridge one’s personal experiences with the larger cultural occurrences using art, performance and custom workshops. Explore Natalie’s poetry in her collection “Miraculous!” below.
Books to Learn About Pauli Murray
Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray by Rosalind Rosenberg
Rosalind Rosenberg is Professor of History Emerita at Barnard College, Columbia University. In this definitive biography, Rosalind Rosenberg offers a poignant portrait of a figure who played pivotal roles in both the modern civil rights and women's movements.
Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage by Pauli Murray
First published posthumously in 1987, Pauli Murray’s Song in a Weary Throat was critically lauded, winning the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Lillian Smith Book Award among other distinctions. Yet Murray’s name and extraordinary influence receded from view in the intervening years; now they are once again entering the public discourse. With the republication of this “beautifully crafted” memoir, Song in a Weary Throat takes its rightful place among the great civil rights autobiographies of the twentieth century.
Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family by Pauli Murray
First published in 1956, Proud Shoes is the remarkable true story of slavery, survival, and miscegenation in the South from the pre-Civil War era through the Reconstruction. Written by Pauli Murray the legendary civil rights activist and one of the founders of NOW, Proud Shoes chronicles the lives of Murray's maternal grandparents. From the birth of her grandmother, Cornelia Smith, daughter of an enslaved woman to the story of her grandfather Robert Fitzgerald, whose free Black father married a white woman in 1840, Proud Shoes offers a revealing glimpse of our nation's history.
New Releases from 2021
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness by Da’Shaun Harrison
Belly of the Beast is a brief but powerful and informative book. Taking on desirability politics, f*ckability, healthism, hyper-sexualization, invisibility, and the connections between anti-fatness and police violence, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness–and offers strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that says “fat is bad,” and moving beyond the world we have now toward one that makes space for the fat and Black.
Belly of the Beast will be discussed in our January 2022 book club!
We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba's work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world.
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Expanded Second Edition) by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, foreward by Angela Davis
In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.